“Communism is premised on the state,” Elizabeth Spalding says. “And the state is above all. There’s no transcendent truth. ... Everything must serve or be made to serve the state. ... All life is cheap in comparison to the [Communist] Party.”
In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek spoke with Spalding, the founding director of the new Victims of Communism Museum in Washington. It’s the first museum in America honoring the tens of millions of people killed by communism in the past century, as well as the many millions more who suffered and continue to suffer under communist dictatorships.
She is also the vice chair of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Some people still don’t understand that there are victims of communism. They might not even understand what communism is. And there are people defending communism. We want to make sure that at this museum, people can learn about communism and the atrocities it has perpetuated for a century in more than 30 countries. Five countries still have communist regimes, and they’re making more victims all the time.
Today, more than 1.5 billion people live under communism in China, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba. These people are victims in that they don’t get to choose freely in their lives. We need to understand that not only the people killed by communism are victims, but also those forced to live under communism, even as they resist.
A lot of people decide to join the Party. It’s easier. Just go along and get along. Others decide to try to get out. I understand that’s what happened with your mom, which is a great story. The Communist Party wanted her to live differently, and she said no. A major theme here at the Victims of Communism Museum is resistance.
Skip ahead a few years, after the Berlin Wall fell, and I was talking with my parents about how people were forgetting these things.
This was of grave concern to my parents, who had fought communism their whole lives. We were having brunch one Sunday after church, just a couple of months after the wall fell. My mother said, “You know, there should be some sort of memorial and museum to the victims of communism.” My father said, “That’s a great idea.” So he took his napkin and wrote down “victims of communism, a memorial and museum.”
That was the start of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was then chartered by a unanimous act of Congress in 1993 and signed into law by President [Bill] Clinton. For a number of years, [the foundation] was very busy, all people working for free, including my father, Lee Edwards, who’s worked all of his life on these kinds of issues. Finally, they raised enough money for a memorial that’s on federal parkland in Washington, D.C. It was dedicated in 2007 by President [George W.] Bush.
It’s a nonpartisan group, bringing together Americans and people from around the world who understand that the victims of communism should be remembered. And then they wanted a museum. There were some roadblocks along the way. Raising money isn’t easy. Finally, several years ago, some more, bigger donations came in, not enough to do a museum the size of the Holocaust [Memorial] Museum, but to do something.
That’s when we decided to do what we’re calling a jewel box museum—something that tells the story about the victims of communism in a small space, but does it well. I spent the better part of two years researching and working with other scholars, but also writing and editing everything that people see on the walls in the museum.
The numbers are always hard to count, but scholars in recent years have settled on about 4 million for the Holodomor. The Ukrainians could have fed themselves and everybody else, except the communists said, “No, we need these quotas of grain met,” and they were impossible quotas. They took their crops and livestock, and consigned them to death. This is another truth of communism: Life is very cheap to them.
And some of the states that have adopted a Victims of Communism Day are now talking about offering a curriculum. Florida has passed a couple of pieces of legislation requiring education on communism and its victims. We also offer a summer seminar for ongoing certification for teachers. It’s open to middle school and high school teachers, whether they teach in public school, private school, or homeschool. We’re teaching them so that they understand what happened and what is happening in regard to communism.
We have to realize that freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the press are precious and can be either given away or taken away if we don’t understand what they are and live them appropriately and responsibly.
